CZESLAW MILOSZ
483
heroic figures of the twentieth century who have to be forgotten so that
someday, when just deserts are fairly distributed, their fame will be even
greater. He was an intellectual with an honest, independent mind; he un–
derstood the totalitarian systems he fought against. He had fought
against Fascism in Italy, his fatherland; against Franco in Spain as a pilot
in Malraux's division (reading Plato); after the war, against Soviet
Communism, as co-editor (with Ignazio Silone) of the journal
Tempo
Presente .
I had come across his name during my first stay in America when
I read, with appreciation, his essays in
Partisan Relliewand Politics.
Well,
Nicola , who at that time was a respected theater critic in Rome, argued
over wine that the ambitions of film directors - Fellini, Antonioni, for
instance - don't match their intellectual preparation, that in their effort
to equal the great writers of the nineteenth century they reveal their in–
tellectual poverty and their susceptibility to social cliches. I remember his
harsh pronouncements whenever I go to the movies with the hope of
nourishing both my eyes and my mind, only to walk out into the street
afterwards with a bad taste in my mouth, a feeling of shame, or simple
rage . Such superb technique, such expertise at taking beautiful pho–
tographs, and such trash? One might even think that the medium itself,
due to the necessity of introducing action to keep the viewer from
falling asleep, contains within itself the unmasking of the novel's devices ,
which are unpleasantly revealed in it, while the writer, working with
verbal material, has many other ways of grabbing his readers' attention.
One way or another, the characters and their mutual relations lose their
multidimensionality. Words, should a director attempt to rely on them,
vanish with the passing moment once they are uttered; they do not re–
main before our eyes as in a book. Perhaps responsibility for these meager
results should be placed on financial and social pressures, on the character
of a given civilization, or on the selection (artistically
in minus)
of the
type of person who is suited to be a director, who has to be too much
a man of action, a politician, a financier, for the Muses to love him.
Jllly
23, 1988. "But," someone will object, "film has produced master–
plCces."
True enough. But it may well be that these are solely film master–
pieces, limited to that medium, and untranslatable into the thoughts and
sensibilities that were the strength of the novel in its prime. There have
been exceptions, but, nonetheless, a viewer such as I has the constant
feeling of the almost limitless possibilities of film that have not as yet
been realized. Perhaps the chief contribution of cinema in this century is
that its formulations and devices have fertilized literature - both poetry
